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Article

Margaret Medley

Publication History:

English diplomat, collector and art historian. In 1947, as a member of the British Diplomatic Service, he was posted to Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, then the capital of the Nationalist Chinese government. He became interested in Chinese art and history and began a collection of porcelain, furniture and textiles at a time of political and economic uncertainty, when Chinese collectors were forced to sell. When he moved to the British embassy in Beijing in ...

Article

Christophe Spaenjers

Publication History:

Set of financial methods, instruments, and business models that are used in the Art market. Important developments since the 1960s include the spreading availability and use of art price information and price indexes (seeArt index), the emergence of loans collateralized by artworks, repeated efforts to create art investment structures, and a strong growth in art market advisory services provided by wealth managers and new entrepreneurs (...

Article

Ken Brown and Karen L. Brock

Publication History:

Shogunal dynasty that ruled Japan during the Muromachi period (1333–1568). According to the anonymous Taiheiki (‘Chronicle of great peace’; ?1370–71), Ashikaga, the name of a town in Shimotsuke Province (now Tochigi Prefect.), was taken as a family name by a branch of the military Minamoto family. The Ashikaga came to power when the first Ashikaga shogun, Takauji (...

Article

Matico Josephson

Publication History:

American multi-ethnic arts organization based in New York’s Chinatown. The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) and its predecessors, the Asian American Dance Theatre (1974–93) and the Asian Arts Institute (1981–8), emerged from the milieu of the Basement Workshop, the first working group of the Asian American Movement on the East Coast, whose mouthpiece was the journal ...

Article

S. J. Vernoit

Publication History:

English civil servant and collector
of Islamic and Chinese art. The eldest son of Sir Thomas Barlow, royal physician and president of the Royal College of Physicians, he was educated at Marlborough and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1906 he was appointed to a clerkship in the House of Commons, by ...

Article

Gabriel P. Weisberg

Publication History:

French art dealer, critic and patron, of German birth. Often misnamed Samuel, he was a major promoter of Japanese art and Art Nouveau. From a wealthy, entrepreneurial Hamburg family, he trained as an industrial decorator for ceramics under the guidance of his father and independently in Paris during the Second Empire (...

Article

Carol Michaelson

Publication History:

Chinese dynasty that ruled in southern China between ad 557 and 589. It was the last of the so-called Six Dynasties (222–589), who were the ‘legitimate’ successors to the Han dynasty (206 bc–ad 220) and made Jiankang (now Nanjing) their capital.

Publication History:

Chikuto was the son of a doctor in Nagoya. At the age of 15, he became the protégé of the rich businessman and collector Kamiya Ten’yu, who was also from Nagoya and through whom he met many artists and studied Chinese pictorial techniques. It was through Tenyu that Chikuto made the acquaintance of the painter Yamamoto Baiitsu (...

Article

Junghee Lee

Publication History:

Korean dynasty that ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 to 1910. The founder of the dynasty, Yi Sŏng-gye, posthumously known as King T’aejo (reg 1392–8), established Neo-Confucianism as the official ideology, encouraging a modest and practical lifestyle. Thus the patronage of extravagant art was discouraged, and the status of the artist was reduced. Buddhism was often zealously suppressed but remained the private religion of the palace women, the common people and even some kings. ...

Article

David S. Brooke

Publication History:

American collector. Clark was educated at Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University, and served in the US Army from 1899 to 1905. He led an expedition to northern China in 1908–9 and published an account of it, Through Shen Kan, with Arthur Sowerby in 1912. He settled in Paris in ...

Article

Lillian B. Miller

Publication History:

American businessman, collector, patron and dealer. He began collecting art in 1869 with paintings by American Hudson River school artists and conventional European works, Chinese porcelain, antique pottery and 17th- and 18th-century English furniture. By 1883 his taste had focused entirely on American works, especially on paintings by ...

Article

Elizabeth F. Bennett

Publication History:

Published online:

2003

Chinese calligrapher, epigrapher and collector
. Born into a rich and cultured merchant family, he entered the district school at 16 and at 17 began to study seal script (zhuanshu) under Chen Huan (1786–1863). He received his jinshi degree in 1868 and became a scholar at the Hanlin Academy in Beijing, followed by two years at the Suzhou Provincial Printing Office. In succeeding years, he distinguished himself as an army officer, diplomat and civil servant. He became Governor of Guangdong Province in ...

Article

Elizabeth F. Bennett

Publication History:

Published online:

2003

Chinese painter, calligrapher, collector and forger
. From an artistic family, he began to paint under the tutelage of his mother, Ceng Yi, and did his first paid painting for the local fortune-teller when he was 12 years old. Zhang’s elder sister gave him his first lessons in the classics. At 15 he embarked on three years of schooling at the Qiujing Academy in Chongqing. In ...

Article

S. J. Vernoit

Publication History:

English businessman, collector and connoisseur of Chinese art. He was educated at Elphinstone College, Bombay, and at the universities of Bombay and London. During several years in East Asia he studied the cultures and languages of China and Japan. From 1928 to 1929 he was honorary adviser to the Palace Museum, Beijing. He developed at an early date a knowledge of the imperial collections in Beijing unique in the West, and by the early 1930s he had formed an extremely important collection of Chinese ceramics, with a high number of dated and inscribed pieces, many of which are of historical value. From ...

Article

Elizabeth F. Bennett

Publication History:

(b Fengrun, Hebei Province, 20 April 1861; d Zizhou [modern Zizhong], Sichuan Province, 27 Nov 1911). Chinese collector and high official. His Chinese ancestors, named Tao, moved to Manchuria in the Ming period (1368–1644), intermarried with the indigenous Manchu, accepted the clan name Tohoro and became part of the Manchu Plain White Banner, one of the four original military and administrative units of Manchuria. Duanfang’s family returned to China after the Manchu conquest of China and the establishment of the Qing dynasty (...

Article

S. J. Vernoit

Publication History:

English collector. The eldest son of a Greek merchant, Eumorfopoulos worked for the merchant firm of Ralli Brothers. He initially collected European porcelains and Japanese tea bowls but then turned to Chinese objects, which became his largest collection, emphasizing pottery and porcelains. His second interest was metalwork, and he formed a fine collection of Chinese bronzes; he was also interested in other media, such as jade. He chose items based on his aesthetic response rather than archaeological or rarity value, and he thus placed himself at the forefront of Western taste for Chinese art. From ...

Article

Ju-Hsi Chou

Publication History:

Chinese painter, calligrapher, seal-carver, collector and poet. The son of a minor official in charge of local education, Gao developed an interest in poetry, painting and seal-carving in his early youth, when he also began to collect old seals and inkstones. The great poet Wang Shizhen took a liking to him and left instructions before his death that Gao be admitted into the ranks of his disciples. A relative of the poet, ...

Article

Nancy E. Green

Publication History:

American curator, scholar, collector, and educator. Fenollosa played a unique role in enhancing the appreciation of Japanese art in both its native country and within the USA. Educated at Harvard, after graduation he studied philosophy and divinity at Cambridge University, followed by a year at the newly founded art school at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He also formed important friendships with the collectors ...